Internet as medium with different sub-media or channels?
Hello, I've been researching the internet as information source and now I want to make a distinction between different applications online, like www, email, msn, ... My question is how I need to describe these online applications: are they different (sub-)media (together forming the meta-medium Internet) or are they different channels within the Internet as medium? I've read different voices in literature and now I'm so confused I can't get out anymore ;-) If anybody has a opinion or suggested litterature, I will be grateful. Thanks in advance! Michaël Opgenhaffen Lessius Hogeschool Antwerp Belgium -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: Brian Cugelman [mailto:BCugelman@unfccc.int] Verzonden: vr 10/03/2006 21:22 Aan: air-l@listserv.aoir.org CC: Onderwerp: [Air-l] Brian Cugelman is out of the office. I will be out of the office starting 10/03/2006 and will not return until 21/03/2006. For web or CMS related matters, please contact Cécile Gunera cgunera@unfccc.int. _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Hi, Michaël! 'Medium' is a confusing word, as it is used in (at least) four different ways: (1) as material used in a work of art, like "oil on canvas". This is the sense of the word Lev Manovich is using in _The Language of New Media_. (2) As file types, such as (ASCII) text, video, image, etc. You find this use in Computer Science. (3) as any kind of technology linking people together (or as McLuhan put it: an extension of the human senses). "Internet" will be a medium in this sense. (4) As a complex institution consisting of (at least) a technology (like broadcast TV), an economic pattern (like commercials or licence fee), a set of law regulations (for TV, you typically need a charter, and there are special regulations in terms of ownership, content, etc.), a typical use in a society (for TV, prime time is in the evening, when people want to be entertained), and some dominant genres (for TV: sit-coms, news, sports, reality...). This last sense is the one normally implied, if not explicitly accounted for, in media studies. As I do media studies, that is my favorite too. I would say that the Internet is a technology (as ink and paper is), enabling several other technologies such as Web, e-mail, chat, ftp, RSS, online gaming, etc. These technologies will in turn be made into media. Even the Web is not one medium in my view. Before the net, no one would say that a book and a bookshop was the same. It make no more sense to me to claim that New York Times on the web, an online novel like Sunshine '69, a Java game, Ebay, and Amazon.com are the same medium. For practical research, i think 'genre' is a much more useful concept than 'medium'. It is more flexible, and more theorised in a useful way. Check out Genette's _Architext_ for a great discussion on genre. I've written about this in a chapter of my thesis: Fagerjord, Anders. _Rhetorical Convergence: Earlier Media Influence on Web Media Form._ Oslo: Unipub, 2003. --anders ........................ Anders Fagerjord, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern, N-0317 OSLO, Norway Tel. +47 22 85 04 11 Fax +47 22 85 04 01 http://fagerjord.no
A fifth meaning for the word "medium" is "person who can talk to ghosts and otherwise dead people." This meaning doesn't really pertain to what most of us are studying, but students are often writing about "mediums" when they mean "media" and so I find myself explaining the difference to them about once a semester... Ulla --- Ulla Bunz Assistant Professor Department of Communication University Center C, Suite 3100 Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306 Email: ubunz@fsu.edu Phone: 850-644-1809 -----------------------------------------------
Ulla:
A fifth meaning for the word "medium" is "person who can talk to ghosts and otherwise dead people." This meaning doesn't really pertain to what most of us are studying...
In "Speaking into the Air," John Durham Peters takes this idea--angelic communication and communion with the dead--as the starting point for thinking about what we do when we (fail to) communicate. If "real" communication is between embodied individuals, it seems that most of us study ghosts in some form. But I'm pretty sure that's not what your students mean :).
Quoting Alex Halavais <halavais@gmail.com>:
Ulla:
A fifth meaning for the word "medium" is "person who can talk to ghosts and otherwise dead people." This meaning doesn't really pertain to what most of us are studying...
In "Speaking into the Air," John Durham Peters takes this idea--angelic communication and communion with the dead--as the starting point for thinking about what we do when we (fail to) communicate. If "real" communication is between embodied individuals, it seems that most of us study ghosts in some form.
There's also Jeff Sconce's "Haunted Media," exploring the essentially uncanny nature of electronic communication's aura of presentness and simultaneity. His first chapter, in fact, is titled "Mediums and Media" and discusses just this semantic overlap and its implications. --------------------------------------- Bob Rehak Department of Communication and Culture Mottier Hall, 1790 East Tenth St. Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405-9700 Associate Editor, North America Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal will be published by Sage starting 2006. Subscribe now for a free online subscription! www.sagepub.co.uk/animation
Jeffrey Sconce's "Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television" is an interesting read along these lines, too. Sj On Mar 13, 2006, at 10:25 AM, Alex Halavais wrote:
Ulla:
A fifth meaning for the word "medium" is "person who can talk to ghosts and otherwise dead people." This meaning doesn't really pertain to what most of us are studying...
In "Speaking into the Air," John Durham Peters takes this idea--angelic communication and communion with the dead--as the starting point for thinking about what we do when we (fail to) communicate. If "real" communication is between embodied individuals, it seems that most of us study ghosts in some form.
But I'm pretty sure that's not what your students mean :). _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
angel from the greek angelia meaning message which is separate from the greek logos which means 'meaning' or 'word', amongst other things. there is also a special word, but I'm at a loss to find it, and it wasn't revelation or annunciation, for the communication of angels as beings not message to humans. This word separates the communication of Angels from the communication of other spirits. in any case, one must be careful with the ontological functions of otherness here, because communication is not quite the same when you imagine beings outside of time, unaffected by physicality, or otherwise different from our life-world and embodiment. On Mar 13, 2006, at 11:25 AM, Alex Halavais wrote:
Ulla:
A fifth meaning for the word "medium" is "person who can talk to ghosts and otherwise dead people." This meaning doesn't really pertain to what most of us are studying...
In "Speaking into the Air," John Durham Peters takes this idea--angelic communication and communion with the dead--as the starting point for thinking about what we do when we (fail to) communicate. If "real" communication is between embodied individuals, it seems that most of us study ghosts in some form.
But I'm pretty sure that's not what your students mean :). _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu jeremy.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal
Misgivings about the implied magical transparency of communication technologies aside... There's a nice quote from John Durham Peters that resonates with me in terms of what I see happening a lot on the web at the moment: the breakdown of distinctions between private/intimate and public communication. I see this happening through the articulation of individual social networking with personal narrative and public or networked portfolios of creative content. I think of the desires expressed in this way as a "becoming real" to the network: The quote - "If success in communication was once the art of reaching across the intervening bodies to touch another’s spirit, in the age of electronic media it has become the art of reaching across the intervening spirits to touch another body. Not the ghost in the machine, but the body in the medium is the central dilemma of modern communications." (1999, pp. 224-225) Cheers Jean Burgess http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~burgess Researcher and PhD Candidate Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology Australia On 14/03/2006, at 2:25 AM, Alex Halavais wrote:
Ulla:
A fifth meaning for the word "medium" is "person who can talk to ghosts and otherwise dead people." This meaning doesn't really pertain to what most of us are studying...
In "Speaking into the Air," John Durham Peters takes this idea--angelic communication and communion with the dead--as the starting point for thinking about what we do when we (fail to) communicate. If "real" communication is between embodied individuals, it seems that most of us study ghosts in some form.
But I'm pretty sure that's not what your students mean :). _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
participants (8)
-
Alex Halavais -
Anders Fagerjord -
Bob Rehak -
Bunz, Ulla -
Jean Burgess -
Jeremy Hunsinger -
Opgenhaffen Michaël -
Steve Jones